


Not Quite Love

by nagi_schwarz



Series: Comment Fic 2016 [24]
Category: Night World - Fandom
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-10
Updated: 2016-06-10
Packaged: 2018-07-14 04:53:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7154387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagi_schwarz/pseuds/nagi_schwarz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the comment_fic prompt: "any vampire fandom, author's choice, instead of falling in love with a teenager the vampire falls in love with someone middle-aged or above."</p><p>Quinn's lovers before he finds his soulmate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not Quite Love

Quinn didn't do love. Caring was not an advantage. But companionship was welcome, when it was suitable. He could only tolerate lamia and vampire politics for so long, but because Hunter Redfern had married a witch all those centuries ago, lamia and vampire politics were also witch politics, and the werewolves and shape-shifters just had to have their say, and every few decades he needed a break.  
  
So he searched for a companion among the mortals. How Garnet and Lily could stand taking mortal lovers whose ages matched the lamia girls' physical ages was a mystery. Quinn was eighteen years old. And he had been eighteen years old since 1621. His compact body and baby-smooth face made him look even younger - until a brave soul dared meet his glacial gaze.   
  
When he went roaming, seeking companionship, coquettish girls and childish boys still living under their parents' thumbs wanted to roam alongside him, take their first chances at freedom and rebellion. The first half dozen or so times, it was fun, running around, pretending to be a child again.  
  
But it fast became boring. His young companions were still fumbling to find themselves, to find each other, and he knew who and what he was. He was an elder, an enforcer, Hunter Redfern's right hand, ensuring the Night World remained in the shadows. He'd found someone else, once (Dove Redfern, lamia, slain by a pastor who thought she'd murdered his only son), and once was enough.  
  
He wanted someone who was a challenge. He wanted someone who was interesting. (But not so interesting that he would end up embroiled in yet another political plot between the Draches and the Harmans.) When he attempted to engage mortals who were truly adults, they tried to mentor him, or they condescended to him. Sometimes he let them think they were teaching him or corrupting them or whatever they fantasized about, but it too became boring.   
  
Time marched on, and society progressed, and society became increasingly obsessed with protecting children, cosseting children, preserving their innocence (stupidity) for longer and longer periods of time. It was no longer acceptable for grown men to allow a "boy" Quinn's age to drink with them and revel with them. Women who were old enough to be interesting were locked far out of reach by society's judgmental gaze.  
  
And then it happened. The sexual revolution. Mortals rebelled in droves. They flooded city streets and danced in the shadows and intoxicated themselves (and made themselves easy prey for Quinn's brothers and sisters in the night). Where many of the vampires and lamia grew their hair and wore flowers and joined in the revels (and got high on drugged blood), Quinn eschewed the fashions of the day. He wore button-down shirts and suspenders and neat slacks and a vest over his shirt-sleeves and walked with a jacket slung casually over one shoulder, a cap perched at a jaunty angle. He walked straight out of another century and into a bar where the bartender didn't ask questions. He picked a stool, ordered an entire bottle of absinthe and sugar cubes, and then he waited.

The woman who finally dared approach him was in her late thirties, early forties. She stood out in a crowd of fringed, tie-dyed hippie apparel with her well-cut business suit and her polished shoes. She perched on the bar stool beside him with the grace of a European duchess, and she was smoking a cigarette on the end of a long, tapered holder.  
  
"Well I'll be damned," she said. "You look just like a guy I used to know."  
  
Quinn raised his eyebrows. "You use that line on all the boys?"  
  
She laughed, her voice deep and throaty. "No. But when I was a kid, living in Boston, my sister ran around with this cool cat. Called himself Quinn. Never did learn if that was his first name or his last, or maybe just one he picked for himself. But he had these eyes." She reached forward, cupped his chin in her hand, tilted his head up. "Yeah. Just like that. You know him, kid? You related to him?"  
  
He could tell by the way her pupils were blown that she was sky high after her day of clawing at the glass ceiling in corporate America. So he leaned into her touch, grinned a little so she could see his fangs, and said, "I am him." Boston was his hometown, his stomping grounds, and every few decades he liked to go back, see how it had grown, changed, stayed the same.  
  
Her eyes widened with the delight. "You remember me, then?"  
  
"Been a long time, doll." He nuzzled her hand. "You'll have to remind me."  
  
She told him her name, and she described a house that had been several streets over from the bar where he'd like to drink (pretended to get drunk). When he wasn't brawling with boys from the local Irish mob crew, he'd play baseball in the street with a bunch of kids from the local public school. He remembered her sister, a sweet thing with dark ringlets and a sweeter mouth. And now he could see, beneath the lines on her face and the weariness in her eyes, the little girl with the gap-toothed smile and the ribbons in her hair.  
  
"Yeah," he said, voice low and intimate. "I remember you."  
  
She laughed again, and the sound was intoxicating. "How is that possible?"  
  
"It's the Age of Aquarius." He levered a sugar cube onto the special silver spoon, unscrewed the cap off the absinthe with a deft twist of his other hand. "Free your mind."  
  
"Serve me up one of those, kiddo," she said, "and tell me how you've been."  
  
"Nah." He offered her the spoon first, because his mama had raised him right, and he was a gentleman in a world where gentlemen were liars and thieves and madmen were prophets and saints. "I'm the same old me, bitter kid from Southie. Tell me how you've been. You've come a long way from ribbons and knee-socks."  
  
So she told him about school, and high school, and the boy she fell in love with who turned into the man who liked to beat her, and she talked about how she ran away in the middle of the night, jumped on a train and rode the rail to Chicago. He drank a shot of absinthe straight from the bottle and pulled her for a kiss that was green and hallucinogenic, and then he rested his head above her heart while she narrated the tale of her work as a court reporter, and then a law clerk, and then her harrowing years in law school to become a lawyer. They danced in the shadows to the rhythm of her endless days slaving toward her billable hours, the associate she had to sleep with for a promotion and the partner she had to blackmail for a buy-in. She told him how she'd always been jealous of her big sister, who'd been effortlessly beautiful and had always gotten what she wanted. She told him she'd always dreamed of kissing Quinn, who'd breezed through town one summer, had a fastball that was almost inhuman, and who'd gifted her sister with lazy, open-mouthed kisses that made the nuns at school shriek in horror.  
  
Quinn picked her pocket for her hotel key, and in her executive suite, he gifted her with those same lazy, open-mouthed kisses over and over again, till they lay panting and sated in the dark. It wasn't summer anymore, and this certainly wasn't love, but it was better than anything Quinn had had before. (Just his luck, then, that a couple of decades later, he'd find his soulmate in a teenager. Lily and Garnet would be laughing in their graves - or spinning.)


End file.
